73rd San Sebastian Festival - 19/27 September 2025
73SSIFF - 19/27 September 2025
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Z365" or "Festival all year round" is the new strategic point of the Festival in which converge investigation, accompaniment and development of new talents (Ikusmira Berriak, Nest); training and cinematic knowledge transfer (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Zinemaldia + Plus, Filmmakers' dialogue); and investigation, disclosure and cinematic thought (Z70 project, Thought and Discussion and Research and publications).
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Agenda
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New Directors
Films
Films
Zabaltegi New Directors
Zabaltegi New Directors
Amma Asante
UK
91 min.
Set in a small community in a docks area of South Wales hit by the economic crisis. A teenage mother, Leigh-Anne Williams, and her three friends (Robbie, 17, determined to move beyond his dead-end community; Gavin, also 17, desperately chasing love; and Stephen, 15, yearning for a Welsh identity) operate along the margins of society, until one day, paranoia, boredom, frustration and anger form a lethal combination. When her baby girl?s future appears threatened, Leigh-Ann?s Turkish Muslim neighbour becomes the target of pent-up anger and humiliation. A murder takes place, seemingly driven by racial hatred, and in a moment the four teenagers seal their fate.
Jorge Gaggero
Argentina-Spain
85 min.
Beba knew how to handle her well-to-do life. Once boss of her own cosmetics company, now she?s obliged to sell her beauty products door-to-door. Her thick gold earrings and live-in maid are all she has left of a status she?s not about to give up. Dora arrived at the age of 17 from the province of Chaco to work as a live-in for Señora Beba and ever since has been building a house in the Buenos Aires suburbs with her earnings. The thing is that can?t finish the house because Beba owes her six months? pay. Tired of her boss?s false promises and determined to face the challenge of living her own life, Dora decides to leave. Some time later, having had to rent out her flat to cover her debts, Beba has nowhere to go and ends up moving in with Dora.
Simon Staho
90 min.
Dag og Nat is about people who want to love and be loved. It?s the story of a father, his son, his unfaithful wife, her secret lover, his young mistress, his lonely sister, his absent-minded mother, a fanatical football coach, a pregnant prostitute and an angel disguised as an old man. What they want to know is: if the answer is love, what?s the question?
David Grieco
Italy-Russia
112 min.
Who?s behind the terrifying ?Monster?, one of the most ruthless criminals in history? How can one man alone rape, murder and devour more than 50 children and adolescents with no trace anywhere in the boundless territory of the country once called the Soviet Union? Detective Vadim Timurovic Lesiev, a young magistrate and family man, urgently needs to find the answers to these terrifying questions. To unmask and capture the Monster, he has to penetrate his mind. Lesiev is a model communist, but then so is the assassin. The detective will succeed where others have failed. But the victory leaves Lesiev open to a succession of new and terrifying nightmares. A cold-blooded metaphor for an era triggered by the October Revolution.
Pablo Malo
Spain
97 min.
25-year-old Adrián has the feeling that his life is going definitively down the drain on being told on the morning he leaves the mental health centre in which he spends long stretches of time that his father has decided to move house and live far away from him. At the other end of the city, Raquel scrapes a living as a prostitute while her teenage son Gonzalo seeks for a break in a life from which he needs to get away. The night that Gonzalo and Adrián?s paths cross will mark the start of something that none of the three could ever have imagined.
Bettina Oberli
Switzerland
93 min.
Edwin Graf, his wife Kathrin and their daughter Lisa lead a middle-class life in a middle-class town where they have started building their own house. Due to structural changes in his company, Erwin loses his job. In order not to frighten his wife, he keeps his unemployment secret, pretending to go off to work each morning. In the beginning Erwin is confident that he?ll find a new job and goes for various interviews. But as time goes by without any notable success, he realises that a man at his age is not as wanted as he thought in the current economic situation. Slowly Kathrin and Lisa begin to notice changes in Erwin. The tension in the family grows, but it?s impossible to talk to him. Kathrin feels abandoned and Lisa shuts herself in her bedroom. Until Lisa finds out that her father has been unemployed for weeks.
Rouven Blankenfeld
Germany
75 min.
Maria and her husband move in with her father after he suffers a debilitating aneurism. The situation becomes too much for Maria to handle when her father?s intensive need for her attention conflicts with her husband?s expectations. Soon her husband?s insensitivity and lack of support turns abusive. To further complicate matters, Maria begins to receive anonymous phone calls, gradually creating a distance from her family and from her deep-seated religious values.
Brad McGann
New Zealand
126 min.
Paul, a battle weary war photographer, returns to his remote New Zealand hometown, when his father dies, and faces the past he left behind. To his surprise, he also finds the sixteen-year-old Celia, the daughter of his first girlfriend, who hungers for the world beyond her small town. But many, including the members of both their families, frown upon the friendship and when Celia goes missing, Paul becomes increasingly persecuted as the prime suspect in her disappearance. As the violent and urgent truth gradually emerges, Paul is forced to confront the family tragedy and betrayal he ran from as a youth, and to face the grievous consequences of silence and secrecy that has surrounded his entire adult life.
Lucile Hadzihalilovic
France
115 min.
Six-year-old Iris very quickly discovers the rules of her boarding school where teaching centres on dance, physical education and biology. Obedience is paramount, and any boarder rebelling and trying to escape is condemned to stay at the school forever. With time, Iris grows accustomed to her new life. But something irks her: every evening at nine, when the lamps are lit, the subterranean rumbling returns and the oldest boarder Bianca leaves the house to attend a secret meeting. One evening, Iris follows her to the big house where the teachers live. Inside, all seems deserted. Even Bianca appears to have vanished into thin air...
Wong Ching Po
Hong Kong
83 min.
Gangland boss Hong is rumoured to be retiring. His subordinates, Figo, Tall Guy and Big Lungs, not to mention his old buddy Lefty, are all making plans to take over his empire. Lefty advises Hong to retire for the sake of his family, but Hong has other plans. Though aware of Figo, Tall Guy and Big Lungs? schemes, he considers it bad policy to wipe them out. Lefty?s goons begin to move in on the three wise guys. Hong proves his command by anticipating Lefty?s every move, finally imposing his authority and taking him along to meet Tall Guy and Big Lungs. The whole shebang is solved in a spectacular fight in the pouring rain.
Ahmet Uluçay
Turkey
97 min.
The 60s in Tepecik, a small Anatolian village. Recep and Mehmet are two young peasants, working as apprentices in the town of Tavsanli near their village. Recep helps a watermelon vendor, while Mehmet works with a barber. Madly in love with cinema, they spend their evenings trying to make a jerry-built film projector. They also dream of being directors and changing their whole lives. One day, Recep meets a widow with two daughters who lives in the town and has come to pick unripe watermelons for her cows. Frequently visiting their home from then on to have tea or breakfast, Recep starts liking the elder daughter, Nihal. As for the girl, she is disturbed by having a peasant boy around the house and treats him as rudely as she can. Her younger sister Guler, on the other hand, likes Recep, but the feeling is not mutual.
Fanta Régina Nacro
France-Burkina Faso
100 min.
In an imaginary West African country, ten years after a bloody civil war, a cease-fire has just been signed between the regular army from the Nayak ethnic group and the rebels from the Bonande ethnic group led by Colonel Theo. On the rebel side everyone is waiting for the arrival of the President and his wife for the peace celebrations. But not everyone agrees to making peace with the secular enemy. Finally, the following evening, the two camps meet. After the initial tension, the atmosphere relaxes; but wounds open again during the night. Reconciliation seems impossible. Despite everything, amid the confusion, some of its protagonists succeed in bringing an end to the spiral of hate, opening the way to a ray of hope for lasting peace.
Ciro Guerra
Colombia
91 min.
Mañe has serious financial problems. He has lost a leg and can?t find a job, hence can?t pay his rent and is the laughing stock of his peers. While wandering the streets trying to get by, he meets an unusual character, a man who carries people on his back through the centre of Bogota for 500 pesos. A ?silletero? . Given their mutual ability to help one another, they strike up a friendship making their lives more bearable and affording them the chance of redemption. But both share a past, the violent past with which Colombians have lived their whole lives. This past unites and separates them, showing them to be people who have lost everything, except the hope of starting over.
Nicolás Tuozzo
Argentina
113 min.
Currently unemployed ex-railway worker Carlos Velmar is interviewed by one of the biggest TV presenters. Carlos tells the unusual tale of five railway workers with different ages and circumstances who have lost their jobs. These good but desperate men try to find their way out of the devastating maze of unemployment and rebuild their lives in a reality that surpasses and surprises them, pushing them towards an unrelentingly bitter fate. Meanwhile, their teenage children, observing their fathers? difficulties, decide to take things into their own hands with a highly risky optimism bringing them together in a unique night mixing irony with truth, courage with death, failure with success. A night that will mark them forever.
Aksel Hennie
Norway
100 min.
25 year-old David has few prospects for the future. His days are spent hanging around with petty criminals at an inner-city gym in Oslo. Still, it?s better than home: his father is terminally ill, his brother suffers from Down?s syndrome and he?s unable to communicate with his mother. Until one day the gym is raided by the police and David chooses to betray his friends in the hope of reaching his father for a last goodbye. But it?s too late. With his father dead and his mother grief-stricken, David is forced to take responsibility for his brother while fighting off his former friends from the underworld. The crisis makes him realize that what?s truly important in life is his family and he starts taking responsibility for both his past and his future. By losing everything, David is given a chance to start over and rebuild his life.
Daniel MacIvor
Canada
99 min.
As a scandal threatens to rock the very foundation of Wilby island, Duck MacDonald, the town?s dyslexic sign-painter, keeps interrupting the depressed video store owner Dan Jarvis during his half-hearted suicide attempts. Meanwhile, Dan has enlisted the blindly-ambitious real estate agent, Carol French, to sell his house in an effort to quickly tie up the last of his loose ends. Carol however is more interested in selling her recently deceased mother-in-law?s house. She could use the help of her police officer husband Buddy, but he has his hands full with perennially-sexy, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Sandra Anderson. Sandra?s daughter Emily is none too thrilled about her mother repeating her typical pattern of married men and bad reputation, but she herself is just about to have her heart broken for the very first time. Of course, everyone?s concerns are going to be very different tonight when someone finds the body in the closet. Welcome to Wilby.
Luis Puenzo
Argentina-Spain
125 min.
Without knowing when and how, Vera lost the pace: she?s stranded in Spain. Her marital crisis, the discovery of a lump in her breast, and a proposal to write the epigraphs of the photos of an Argentinian killed in the Spanish Civil War open the door to escape. In Buenos Aires she undergoes a masectomy and discovers the main clues to her next story. Disentangling the mystery of a whale that got stranded twice or of a chorus girl who works as a prostitute in Patagonia while following the steps of a photographer are only some of the excuses helping her to rediscover the person she once was. Alone at the end of the world, she will fall in love with a stranger in the same brothel bed as the heroes of her novel swore never to fall in love, will dance tango with death and will bury the past in the depths of the sea.
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